Helping Other People’s Customers

This was sure an interesting scenario. I received a phone call from a gentlemen that was all the way from Ontario as he was notified by some of his site visitors that his web site hosting service was suspended for some reason. The company that he was dealing with happened to reside here in BC and so he had been trying virtually every way to get a hold of them with no luck.

The amazing thing was apparently he contacted a lot of other people who tried to help him as much as possible too and before contacting me they found out that the companyâ€™s corporate mailing address was simply one of those UPS mailboxes. Phoning didnâ€™t help either as the message would always say that the personâ€™s mailbox was full and could not receive any new messages.

So initially the person simply left his name and number and I did end up calling him back to learn the story. Itâ€™s funny too as he just said he got hold of my business phone number by doing various searches and drew a big circle around it on his notes as the person that could help him. Strangely enough, I didnâ€™t even have any affiliation with the company in question but were aware of them.

It actually cost me money to help him so far as I had to talk to him long distance as well as taking a bit of time to see what I can do, but itâ€™s always good to help people whenever you can as long as the request isnâ€™t unreasonable or in a demanding fashion even if they arenâ€™t your customer. I personally hate it when you say walk into a store to ask for help only to have the company/staff give you a blunt â€œno purchase no serviceâ€ type of attitude.

To make this situation even more awkward, I found out that the company had what seemed like over 200 different websites that pretty much sold the same thing except they were all branded differently with various names to try and capture different markets. The person sounded sincere though and so hopefully I can help him get his site back up assuming the original provider didnâ€™t simply delete all of his site files.

2 Comments to Helping Other People’s Customers

Cost you money to call long distance? to Ontario ? really? Plenty of ways round that. Skype comes to mind, services like Shaw Digital Phone, Vonage should have plans with unlimited North American calling etc.

Just had to mention it as I was surprised. No arguement though that you gave your time 🙂

Stewart Marshall3/26/2008 9:39 pm

You sound so shock there Stewart. I believe with skype for it to be free the other person would have to be using it too unless i am missing something. I have to use Telus for my business phone service, so I didn’t really have choice.